At O2 we’ve been reviewing the rewards we provide and
have found it necessary to make some changes.
We are sorry to have to tell you that the reward you have
been receiving will end on 30th November 2003.
However your mobiles can still receive best plan advice..(etc)

..Yours sincerely,

Head of Customer Relationship Management, O2 UK’

A reading of the small print on the attached terms and conditions reveals that, despite three and a half years of custom and hundreds
if not thousands of pounds paid in charges, a machine has calculated that my
average monthly spend no longer justifies a loyalty reward. It is tempting to
conjecture that the CRM algorithm has assessed my length of contract and realising
that, as it is 7 months before I am able to cancel, the saving the withdrawal
of the reward will give the company justifies the risk I will cancel my
contract when term elapses. I did not receive a reply to my letter of complaint.
Such is an experience of customer relationship management today.

But then can I expect anything different? I signed a new
twelve month contract in exchange for a free new mobile phone that would have
cost the company over £100. The company is also paying for the hugely expensive
G3 licence as well as investing the infrastructure necessary to bring that
technology into use. This is in the context of a fall in the cost of mobile
services of over 60% over the last ten years.54 The
company must make a profit. It’s business.

This dilemma illustrates the ambivalence of contemporary
consumer experience. Competitive markets have led to the declining relative
cost of a whole range of goods and services over the last 50 years, and
contributed to significant increases in the standard of living for much of the
industrialised West.55 Increasing
competition, deregulation and the efficiencies created by technological
development continue to push prices and margins down. The consumer likes this,
but the companies do not. The need for companies to return profits within these
markets can lead to a consumer experience beset with a sense of injustice and a
feeling of powerlessness.

The relationship between producer and consumer, perhaps,
has always been adversarial: ‘Caveat emptor’ and so forth. It is certainly true that the conception of the consumer embodied by
digital marketing systems and techniques is one that would be familiar to a
late Nineteenth century retailer:

People are only consumers.

Consumers are motivated to consume goods by group norms.

Consumers are essentially passive.

Consumers have no stake in the production process.

For the last 80 years these ideas of what a consumer is
have been extraordinarily successful in delivering material prosperity to the
societies of the democratic industrialised nations and to the companies that
trade within them. It is interesting to ask if this conception of a consumer continues
to be valid or effective. If, as I have claimed, the relationship between
producers and consumers is dialectical, how have changes in the technologies of
production, patterns of work and the values held by individuals changed what it
is to be a consumer?

Clearly people have changed considerably over the period
of the Post-Second World War boom and into the 21st century. Zuboff
and Maxim are good on this area, citing a raft of statistics - from foreign
holiday expenditure, to levels of home schooling, to the numbers using email,
chat rooms and online communities.56 To
those one might add the doubling of the mortgage churn rate (i.e. those
customers moving lender) in the last seven years,57
the rising incidence of divorce,58 the
lack of participation in democratic elections,59 the
increasing indebtedness of individuals.60

The Support Economy is the latest in a number of
books that have been published in recent years which discuss these changes in
relation to business. What unites many of these books is an understanding of
emerging individuality. The emergence is accounted for in different ways, but
essentially comes down to an analysis that points to three factors that
have/are causing change - diminution of the role of institutions in our lives,
a change in values and the rapid spread of technology, particularly information
technology. Central to these accounts is a description of over supply,
memorably identified by Allen Questrom in the quote that heads the
dissertation. We have lots of stuff, most of which we don’t need. Our basic
needs in developed industrial countries have long since been met.

Zuboff and Maxim link oversupply and individuality
explicitly. Considering the period of American economic history from the 1920s
through to the 1990s, they see a number of consequences for Fordist production.
Clearly mass production/consumption delivered enormous material benefits and
unprecedented levels of per capita income. However, the bureaucracies and huge
organisations that characterise this period and mode of production also
engendered an insistence on group affiliation amongst the population. In Zuboff
and Maxim’s interpretation, individuals sought sanctuary in the group, be it
company, union or rotary club, as a way of ensuring material wealth, but also
as a refuge from the chaos of rapid urbanisation and industrialisation. This
maybe a contentious point (did people earn their way out of unionisation or
were they forced?), but the authors are convincing on their thesis that the generation
of the early and mid twentieth century, like the workers at Fords plant,
accepted the conditions of work as a pay off for material prosperity. The
generations born in the industrial west after 1950, however, understood
material comfort as a given, and that the ways of expressing aspiration and
values moved away from objects and goods, and onto experience and individual
self expression. The authors of Funky Business, a dotcom boom bible, adopt
a more proselytising tone: ‘Freedom has thus been thrust back into our hands.
Institutions used to work to create certainty. Now, the certainties are withering.
Blind loyalty has died. We no longer proclaim lifelong loyalty to institutions,
no matter what they are or what they do. We shop around.’61

Some see the changes as ominous, for instance, Robert
Putnam, in his book, Bowling Alone, laments the collapse in membership
of various civic and voluntary organisations. For him this fundamental change
represents selfishness and leads to a degradation of civic life and the
depletion of social capital.62 For
others, such as Zuboff and Maxim the new individuality is to be celebrated as a
natural progression towards some ideal state of being. Rather than receiving
one’s identity from such givens as family, gender, age and class, the personal
construction of ones identity and meaning is seen as an individual’s life
project. Ridderstrale and Nordstrom are more ambivalent in Funky business.
They see choice and individuality as positive but also acknowledge the
fragmentation of society, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the
spiritual vacuum behind a society devoted to material satiety.

People have changed, but how they earn their living has
changed also. To expect life long employment by the one company is now
exceptional. Trade Unions, the expression of workers’ group identity, are no
longer the dominant institutions they once were. Work life now is more
demanding and less secure, with longer hours and the imposition of casual
employment terms on whole swathes of industry, and not simply low income manual
labour. Such changes do suggest a diminishment of collective action, be it
collective bargaining or company pension schemes, but they do impel greater
individuality and self reliance, with the need to retrain or to provide for
one’s own retirement.

We return to the fragmentation that vexed the Financial
Times, but one that is seen as a result of changing patterns of work and
the values of individuals, rather than the product of technology or media
platforms. However, it is the meeting of these three elements (changing patterns
of work, new individuals and technology) that indicates a fundamentally new
consumer, or a new way of being a consumer, is ready to emerge. Certainly,
digital network technologies offer much to the consumer: one click shopping,
online customer reviews, intelligent search bots, aggregated purchases and so
forth. But a reduction of the possibilities of the internet to simply the tools
of purchase is a mistake. As I have pointed out, the relentless automation and
commoditisation such technologies represent, simply drive down margins and create
their network opposite, CRM systems. These purchasing technologies can also be
seen as strategies for the externalisation of costs by companies, that is, the
consumer may pay less for a product, but ends up carrying out much of the work
associated with purchase themselves (filling in application forms, configuring
product etc).

Zuboff and Maxim make similar points in The Support
Economy. Of the many books written by sociologists and business theorists
on the consumer and the new technologies of marketing this is one of the most
comprehensively and persuasively argued. At its heart is a compelling thesis
that individuals have changed faster than the markets that serve them. Unfortunately,
the work makes the mistake of extending consumerism to the level of culture,
which has the reverse effect of collapsing all human experience into commodity,
and with the corrosive effects of capitalism, we see experience emptied of
meaning in the way machine intelligence empties humanity from intelligence.

‘Everyday life has become an object of consideration and
is the province of organization; the space-time of voluntary programmed
self-regulation, because when properly organised it provides a closed circuit
(production-consumption-production), where demands are foreseen because they
are induced and desires run to earth;.."63

Considering Lefebvre’s definition of ‘The Bureaucratic
Society Of Controlled Consumption’64 as
we read the futuristic propaganda of The Store Of The Future (and
especially when we add that some have suggested that the predicted smart
fridges have screens to display advertising for products you are running low
on), we can see Lefebvre’s analysis realised in a grotesque technological
vision. With George Bush’s exhortation to Americans to patriotically keep on
shopping post 9/11, the obligations and limits of a life as a consumer became
unusually visible.

Lefebvre sees the language and signs of marketing as
conditioning how we think of ourselves. Compulsion is central to the ‘The
Bureaucratic Society Of Controlled Consumption’, but also the images of
marketing (what he calls publicity): ‘The act of consuming is as much an act of
the imagination as a real act, (‘reality itself being divided into compulsions
and adaptations) and therefore metaphorical (joy in every mouthful, in every
perusal of the object) and metonymical (all of consumption and all the joy of
consuming in every object and every action).’65 It
is here that Lefebvre locates the eternal dissatisfaction that characterises
modern life, compulsions programmed to desire the disembodied. This
construction of systems of meaning around ‘real’ acts and artefacts, like the
construction of the illusion of self in CRM systems, is challenged by the
heterogeneity of data available of the web. Modern, ‘interactive’ marketing
strategies attempt to deal with this complexity by themselves embracing their
opposite, by the heavy use of self- parody or criticism, yet their
effectiveness, compared to, say, 70s television advertising has been limited.

My contention is that the internet, taken as a whole,
represents a massive search for voice and self-determination by individuals. It
challenges the enervation of consumption. The huge amounts of data,
experiences, opinions, beliefs and politics that the web disseminates and
represents, suggest that, contrary to conventional notions, the consumer is
neither passive, nor that they wish to remain divorced from the production
process. I am thinking here of the legion of hobbyists, DIYers, enthusiasts.
Indeed, vast areas of the internet were built, for free, by enthusiasts in
their bedrooms. The challenges of the new digital technologies of communication
go beyond questions of marketing and call into question the very configuration
of the firm. The technology offers very powerful means for self-organisation
and self-sufficiency, potentially replacing many of the organisational functions
of a firm pioneered by Henry Sloan.

A step forward into this future of business and marketing
might be an acceptance that individuals are more than simply consumers, that
the need to consume goods and services is part of a complex of work and leisure
and that the boundary between these two fundamentals of industrial capitalism -
life as a worker, life as a consumer, are not as absolute as they once were. I
agree with Zuboff and Maxim when they assert the new individual requires the
formulation of new types of capitalist enterprise, one with the needs of the
consumer at its heart. But whilst the best way to organise capital and labour
to create wealth may not be the firm, the best marketing strategy of all is to
give the individual a meaningful occupation and the time to enjoy its benefits.